What is Single Origin?
There are some terms that have begun to appear on the labels of products to give us, the consumers, extra information. One of these is single origin, often relating to huge consumption items such as coffee, but equally applicable to any other agricultural products. Suppose you have a bag of coffee beans that comes from a warehouse which buys in beans from Brazil, India and Indonesia before mixing them all together, roasting and packaging them … definitely not from one origin. But if all your coffee beans have come from Brazil, they can be termed single origin … they do not have to come from just one farm or even just one region, although in some cases a product can come from a single farm, as with our kaffir lime leaves and curry leaves. The term is occasionally applied to spices, although we have never chosen to use it. The label will often tell you; for instance, Safrron Iranian comes from the single origin of Iran, Saffron Kashmiri comes from the single origin of Kashmir. TGSEB (Tellicherry Garbled Special Extra Bold, to give them their full title) peppercorns are from the Tellicherry district of Southern India. Hungarian Sweet Paprika is obviously from Hungary. Australian peppercorns, Aleppo Pepper, and so on, are by definition single origin. By the way, on our website you can see the country of origin of every spice.
It is difficult to apply single origin status for Spanish paprika, however, as paprika is grown in countries such as Africa and South America and shipped to Spain for processing, from whence it is identified as Spanish paprika. It would also be unusual to find single origin Spanish saffron, as this spice is imported from Iran to boost Spain’s small domestic yield.